Very Cheesy Tartiflette

If, when you see a tartiflette recipe recommending a scant 500g of Reblochon cheese, you laugh hollowly while switching back to scroll cheese lifestyle articles on gratemycheese.com, then this might be the recipe for you.

Tartiflette is a French dish providing your full RDA of the 5 French nutrient groups: cheese, cream, wine, bacon and onions. There’s also some potato in there. To make it properly you need Reblochon cheese; handily you can get a pretty passable one from Tesco or M&S. Your local market will probably have a much more authentic Reblochon but the price may be somewhat punitive. Reblochon is an unpasteurised washed-rind soft cheese from the French Alps, with a mild, creamy taste and a nutty aftertaste. It’s passable but uninspiring when eaten cold; on a cheeseboard it can fulfil the role of a Brie or other mild soft cheese. It shines when cooked, especially in recipes with lashings of cream and bacon.

This recipe involves a lot of cheese: we stumbled upon it by following our standard cookery rule of adding 50 % to the recommended amount of any cheese in a recipe and seeing how much that improves it. It’s not too complicated to cook and is very tasty, though it is so calorific as to be hard to recommend for those with sensitive dispositions.

Ingredients – Serves 6, takes 1 hr

• At least 600g of Reblochon
• 1-1.25 kg potatoes
• 200 ml cream
• 2 onions
• 200g bacon lardons
• 150 ml white wine
• A knob of butter
• Salt and pepper

Method

Wash the potatoes and put ’em in a pan to boil. Peel them? What is this, the Ritz? The potato breed doesn’t matter too much because you’re about to cover them with 600 g of cheese, but Maris Piper works fine. Boil them in a very large saucepan according to the recommended time, probably about 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, turn the oven on to 180 C, then peel and coarsely slice the onions into 4 mm-wide strips. Add a big knob of butter to a frying pan and fry the onions and bacon for 2 minutes on medium heat until both are slightly brown, which will probably take another 8 minutes or so. Turn the heat right down and pour in the white wine. Leave this to simmer very gently while the potatoes finish cooking.

You’re going to need to chop really a lot of Reblochon, so start now. Supermarket Reblochon comes in small rounds; slice it radially so you end up with lots of relatively thin wedges, at most 4 mm thick. Typically I’d randomly sample between 1 and 5 slices from every Reblochon just to check it’s good, but this isn’t an essential part of the process and can be skipped if you’re short on time.

Once the potatoes are cooked but still a little firm, drain them and chop them into 3 mm-thick slices. They’ll be really hot, but that’s too bad; you don’t want to be waiting around not eating this Reblochon. A cunning tip is to slice each potato in half then stand the half on its flat end. This stops lots of burning-hot potato rolling around everywhere.

Layer the potato across the bottom of a small lasagne dish, and pour about 200 ml of cream across them. Surprising though this advice sounds, you don’t want to add too much cream (remember any you have left over can be used as a delicious upgrade to milk on the next morning’s breakfast cereal). Spoon the onion-and-bacon mix on top using a slotted spoon so you don’t add too much liquid. Grind a liberal amount of black pepper over the top, then neatly layer the Reblochon slices across the top. You want to achieve good coverage or the potato underneath can burn; luckily you’ve got 50 % more Reblochon than you actually need.

Cook in the oven until the Reblochon has melted, which should take 20-25 minutes. Remove the dish and spoon out about a sixth per person. Serve with crusty bread and a rocket salad.

This is a pretty modular dinner architecture and you can easily substitute various parts. We’ve made a vegetarian version swapping the bacon for mushroom, which was… as OK as you’d expect a recipe with its bacon removed to be. We’ve made a healthy [ed.: please check this is OK with Legal] version replacing the cream with a similar amount of crème fraiche, which is quite a lot less rich. Inspired by the unexpected brilliance of our Total Greek Yoghurt cookbook we’ve made an innovative Savoyard-Mediterranean fusion version replacing the cream with Greek yoghurt, which was slightly weird but worked relatively well with the yoghurt providing an odd but pleasing tang (if you opt for this variant, don’t overdo the yoghurt, and stir it into the potatoes after adding them to the dish). If you can’t find any Reblochon… well, really you don’t want to make this recipe, but you can achieve tolerable results with 250 g of Gruyere and 250 g of Brie.